Female sporting chairs and CEOs disappearing - Women's Agenda

Female sporting chairs and CEOs disappearing

The number of female chairs of Australia’s National Sporting Organisations has almost halved in the last five years, according to research released Monday.

The latest Sydney Scoreboard index, exploring the proportion of women on the boards and in the senior leadership positions of 52 National Sporting Bodies, found that while the number of women directors on such boards has increased, the proportion of female chairs and CEOs has dropped significantly

Women make up 28% of sports board directors, up from 22% in 2009, but just 12% of chairs and 18% of CEOs – down from figures in the early twenties five years ago.

The Index compared Australia’s progress on such boards with 37 other countries, placing us as the sixth most progressive nation when it comes to women board directors but well behind the likes of the Cook Islands where women hold 43% of such positions and Norway (37%).

Meanwhile, Australia is ranked 15 for the representation of female CEOs on sporting organisations, behind countries including Ireland, England, Haiti and Tanzania.

Report author and UTS business school lecturer Dr Johanna Adriaanse told Women’s Agenda the lack of women in sport leadership roles stems from an engrained culture of picking men over women. “Much of it is still to do with the way people are recruited. And there has always been some resistance to targets and quotas, it’s so difficult to disrupt the status quo.”

She points to Hockey Australia as an example of a board that’s particularly forward on embracing gender diversity on its board, and notes a difference between boards that are talking about gender diversity and those actually doing something about it.

“They all say, ‘yes we want gender equality and more women on the boards’, but the organisations that really believe it and say they want it actually make it a priority to make it happen. They take it as a responsibility, that’s a shift in the thinking we want.”

Hockey Australia has a quota requiring a minimum of three men and three women on its board, and Adriaanse believes the entire organisation has benefitted as a result.

Dr Adriaanse is speaking at the 6th IWG World Conference on Women and Sport in Helsinki in June.

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